By HENRIQUE AMORIM & GUILHERME HENRIQUE GUILHERME*

The indication of an industrial platform capitalism, instead of being an attempt to introduce a new concept or notion, aims, in practice, to point out what is being reproduced, even if in a renewed form.

1.

The inclusion of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in production and daily life gave rise to theories, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, which suggested that the “old” industrial capitalism had been transformed into a post-industrial society. In this new society, the contradictions inherent in capitalism had been displaced from production and work to other areas of social life.

This idea is based on two mistaken assumptions: The first one considers industry as a simple synonym for factory, which led a group of authors[I] to the conclusion that capitalism would have surpassed factory production and, therefore, work and the working class would have lost their political and social importance.

The second mistake lies in a limited understanding, which is very common among economists, that industrial is synonymous with the secondary sector. Based on the division of the economy into sectors, primary (agriculture), secondary (industry) and tertiary (services), industry would be restricted to factory production.

The post-industrial perspective can be confronted, first, by starting from Karl Marx's references on the initial forms of capitalist industry in the countryside, which he discussed in the chapter “The So-Called Primitive Accumulation” of The capital. Furthermore, at another point in this work, when Marx discusses the metamorphoses and the cycle of capital, we see that capital, considered by the author in its global cycle as industrial capital, receives this name precisely to signal that the industrial form “encompasses every branch of production conducted in a capitalist manner.” (Marx, 1985, p. 41).[ii]

From this conceptual premise, we can understand that industry goes beyond factories or specific economic sectors: industry is a form of production. Even more than that, industry is the central form of production in capitalist societies.

2.

The second confrontation against the post-industrial perspective can be made when observing the presence of structural forms of organization of capitalist production throughout history. Based on the division into social classes, capitalist cooperation gives rise to the historical capitalist form of organization of labor. It is under capitalist cooperation that the specifically capitalist social division of labor is organized: based on combined social labor under the command of the capitalist.

Digital platforms both reproduce and expand this form. In this context, the process of productive externalization deepens, driven by the introduction of this new productive force or digital platforms as a “new machinery.” The collective worker, renewed under the principles of capitalist cooperation, reproduces the industrial-cooperative structure while deepening its subordination to capital, incorporating old and new labor management practices.

The exploitation of the collective worker is thus strengthened as socially combined labor is reorganized in space and time. The old piecework currently takes on a new form (Casilli, 2020; Gray; Suri, 2017) in a wide range of activities: training Artificial Intelligence systems (Le Ludec et al, 2023); moderating social media content; app-based transportation and food delivery services (Amorim & Moda, 2021); and activities such as generating followers for influencers and producing disinformation (Grohmann; Corpus Ong, 2024).

This radicalization of industry is developed simultaneously with the dispersion of work (Harvey, 1992) in a double sense: first, there is a deeper fragmentation of work (division into smaller tasks, microtasks, standardization, scripts); and second, there is a maintenance of control over the collective worker through the internet, ICTs, data and algorithms as mechanisms to articulate this dispersion of workers and smaller tasks, configuring a new combination between increasingly subdivided jobs.

Contemporary industrial production, with the processes of externalization of production (outsourcing, global displacement of production processes and, more recently, with platformization) maintained control and further centralized power over labor, maintaining hierarchical relationships with subcontracted companies and, now, with platform workers.

This imposes stringent demands on both the quality and quantity of goods produced or goods and passengers delivered, often with shorter and less predictable deadlines. This arrangement has allowed contracting companies to expand their profit margins while progressively reducing the amount of work performed within their own facilities (Chan, Pun and Selden, 2019). 

This process reflects only the tip of the iceberg, the most recent manifestation of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1992), which is characterized by productive flexibilization, rising unemployment, and the management of labor and workers through mechanisms of participation and self-accountability. Thus, externalization occurs in multiple dimensions: within companies, impacting hiring practices, wages, and working hours; and in their external relations, through extensive outsourcing at national and global levels (Tomasina, 2012).

3.

Industrial platform capitalism[iii] is supported by structures that remain 'hidden', hidden beneath a narrative that positions digital platforms and technologies as the only alternatives to social development[iv]. The outsourcing of production processes is the fragmentary and earlier form of what are now known as digital platforms.

The combination of technology, financial globalization, and neoliberal policies has allowed capitalism to further decentralize and disperse production and labor. Through these mechanisms, capital has expanded practices of outsourcing and cost-cutting, driven by the platformization of labor and the systematic erosion of labor rights.

Furthermore, industrial platform capitalism is based on the international division of labor, which shapes the specific socioeconomic organization of each region and influences its relationship with local labor (lack of) protection and the degree of precariousness. This means that, although digital platforms are based on similar models in different parts of the world, they exploit the way labor markets are historically structured within each social formation, with their specific weaknesses and social inequalities, resulting in the creation of a geopolitics of exploitation of platform labor (Abílio, Amorim, Grohmann, 2021).

By assuming such weaknesses and social inequalities[v], industrial platform capitalism creates the appearance of an effective and efficient technological automaton, the tip of the iceberg, but which is based on a foundation of inequalities, social and legal weaknesses that crystallize historical processes of informalization and precarious work.

Simply put: no worker would agree to transport people via app, from one place to another, 14 hours a day, if there were more dignified work and employment alternatives or if the app companies, when legally obliged, paid these workers for the entire time they were at the disposal of the platforms. 

As we have mentioned, digital platforms bear the structural marks of flexible accumulation and externalization processes, and are a synthesis of these processes. As the logic of the platform spreads, it renews social relations of exploitation that have been historically crystallized since colonization and the Industrial Revolution. Some, in this relationship, are responsible for providing the raw materials needed to build the platforms’ infrastructures; others for providing data for Big Data analysis; or even for recruiting and organizing workers for microtasks and Artificial Intelligence training.

If there is, in this sense, a diversity of platform capitalisms in the world, as some authors propose[vi], this diversity is shaped by the same diversity that marked the genesis and formation of capitalist industrial production.[vii]

By emphasizing the industrial aspect of contemporary capitalism, we therefore wish to distance ourselves from the select group of those who merely emphasize the novelties of productive transformations and relegate their permanence to secondary importance. In a context in which transformations are increasingly rapid, emphasizing what is reproduced in the apparently new seems to be a good path for the critical analysis of contemporary capitalist production in which digital platforms are central pieces.

In other words, the idea of ​​an industrial platform capitalism, if we can summarize it this way, does not operate in harmony with apparently similar notions, such as those of the “fatigue society”, “surveillance capitalism” or “cognitive capitalism”. On the contrary, it seeks to highlight the central (and constant) aspects of capitalist production mystified by a fetishized technological structure.

The indication of an industrial platform capitalism, rather than being an attempt to introduce a new concept or notion, aims, in practice, to point out what is being reproduced, even if in a renewed form. With this, the analysis of digital platforms becomes more complex as they present themselves as the most visible part of a long and recently accelerated process of externalization of production costs that deepens the industrial form of capitalist production.

*Henrique Amorim is a professor of Sociology at Unifesp.

*Guilherme Henrique Guilherme is a PhD student in Social Sciences at Unifesp.

References

Abílio, LC (2021) Uberization: Manicurists, motorcycle couriers and the management of survival. In: MARQUES, Léa (ed.) Trajectories of informality in contemporary Brazil. New York, New York: Routledge, 2021. 173-191.

Abílio, LC, Amorim, H., & Grohmann, R. (2021). Uberization and platformization of work in Brazil: Concepts, processes and forms. Sociologies, 2326-56. https://doi.org/10.1590/15174522-116484

Amorim, H; Cardoso, A; Bridi, M. (2022) Industrial Platform Capitalism: externalizations, syntheses and resistances. CRH notebook, v. 35, p. 1-15, 2022.

Amorim, H., Moda, F. (2021). App-based Work: a synthesis of the intensification of work, informality and political resistance in the context of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Work, Politics and Society Magazine 6:105–24. doi: https://doi.org/10.29404/rtps-v6i10.834.

BELL, Daniel. The Advent of Post-Industrial Society: An Attempt at Social Forecasting. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1973.

Casilli, A. (2020) From the virtual class to the click workers: The transformation of work into service in the era of digital platforms. MATRIXes, 14(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1982-8160.v14i1p13-21

Castells, Manuel. 1999 The network society. São Paulo: Peace and Land.

Chan, J., N. Pun, M. Selden. (2019) The politics of global production: Apple, Foxconn and the new Chinese working class. Antunes, R (ed.) Wealth and misery of work in Brazil IV: digital work, self-management and expropriation of life. São Paulo: Boitempo.

Gorz, A (1982) Farewell to the Working Class. An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism. Pluto Press.

Gray, M. L., Suri, S. (2017). The Humans Working Behind the AI ​​Curtain. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/01/the-humans-working-behind-the-ai-curtain

Grohmann, R., Qiu, J. (2020). Contextualizing Platform Work. Counterpoint, 39(1) https://doi.org/10.22409/contracampo.v39i1.42260

HABERMAS, Jünger. Theory of Communicative Action. Madrid: Taurus, 1987.

Harvey, D. (1992) Postmodern Condition: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

Inglehart, Ronald. 1977 The silent revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Le Ludec, C., Cornet, M., & Casilli, A. A. (2023). The problem with annotation. Human labor and outsourcing between France and Madagascar. Big Data & Society, 10 (2)  https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231188723

Marx, K (1985) O Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume II, Book Two. São Paulo: Nova Cultural

Steinberg, M., Zhang, L., & Mukherjee, R. (2024). Platform capitalisms and platform cultures. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1-9

Steinberg, M. (2022). From Automobile Capitalism to Platform Capitalism: Toyotism as a prehistory of digital platforms. Organization Studies, 43(7), 1069-1090. https://doi.org/10.1177/01708406211030681

Surie, A., Sharma, L. V. (2019). Climate change, Agrarian distress, and the role of digital labor markets: Evidence from Bengaluru, Karnataka. DECISION, 46(2), 127-138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40622-019-00213-w

Tomasina, F (2012) Problems in the world of work and their impact on health. Current financial crisis. Public Health Review, 14, 56-67.

Touraine, Alain. 1970 Post-industrial society. Lisbon: Moraes Editores.

Notes

[I] It is possible to indicate as representatives of this perspective, each in their own way, for example, (BELL, 1973); (CASTELLS, 1999); (GORZ, 1982); (HABERMAS, 1987); (INGLEHART, 1977); and (TOURAINE, 1969).

[ii] Authors such as the Italian workerists worked on the idea of ​​the expansion of the factory, pointing to the concept of “social factory”. We perceive, however, that there is an intensification of capitalist industrial production, be it material or immaterial, tangible or intangible, of products or services. More than that, this intensification of industrial production logic is present in a renewed way on digital work platforms.

[iii] The idea of ​​Industrial Platform Capitalism first appears in: Amorim; Cardoso and Bridi (2022).

[iv] Steinberg (2022) provides a compelling counterpoint to these theses, tracing the origins of digital platforms back to the automobile industry, particularly the Toyota Production System.

[v] Abílio (2021), for example, highlights how the characteristics of precariousness prevalent in jobs traditionally dominated by women are being extrapolated to platform-based work.

[vi] Steinberg et al (2024) propose a plural reading to comprehensively address the multiple effects of platformization and decentralize the “West” in discussions about platforms. They highlight that analyses centered on Europe and the US do not consider the different roles of states in relation to platforms. Focusing on Asia, they highlight state-led platformization and the varied relationships between state, market and platforms. In this sense, theory, for these authors, should reflect the diversity of “really existing platform capitalisms”.

[vii] An example of how this debate can take shape is the discussion around “Gig Work”, which highlights that for most workers in the Global South, “gig” is a structuring part of labor markets, long before the advent of platforms (Grohmann and Qiu 2020; Abílio 2021; Surie and Sharma 2019).

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